Co-ed Boot Camp Report Criticized -- 03/17/1999

Co-ed Boot Camp Report Criticized

17 March, 1999

By Lawrence Morahan
CNS Staff Writer

(CNS) – A report by a congressionally-appointed commission that recommends the armed forces should continue to train soldiers in co-ed boot camps was criticized by a leading conservative as an example of Congress "listening to radicals who only want to use the military for their own purposes."

"The feminists have continued to whittle away at all these feminist issues" with the result that "we have utterly destroyed the desire by teenagers to come in the military," said Robert Maginnis, senior director for National Security and Foreign Affairs at the Family Research Center, in an interview with CNS.

Expert studies and even the military's own trainers have criticized mixed gender training, Maginnis said.

According to the report, a copy of which was obtained by CNS, "each service should be allowed to continue to conduct basic training in accordance with its current policies. This includes the manner in which basic trainees are housed and organized into units."

The commission said its "recommendation is based on our conclusion that, in general, the ways in which the services are currently conducting their training, including the gender formats, sustain mission readiness."

The commission was made up of former Defense Department officials, retired military personnel and academicians. Six commissioners voted for the status quo, three abstained, and one voted against.

Proponents of mixed gender training ignore a core set of problems that derive from gender-integrated settings, Maginnis said. These include physical strength differences between the sexes, maintenance of privacy of the sexes, sexual distractions, and perceptions of double standards applied to men and women in disciplinary actions.

Women are nine times more likely than men to tear a knee ligament during military training, Maginnis said.

Mixed gender training also has resulted in an increase of accusations of sexual harassment.

The report is seen as a serious setback for advocates of sex separation, especially after a panel appointed in 1998 by Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen voted 11-0 to recommend segregation at the small-unit level and same-sex barracks at boot camp.

That committee, which was comprised of six women and five men under former Sen. Nancy Kassebaum Baker, a Kansas Republican, called its proposal to separate the sexes a "common sense" approach.

The effort to integrate basic training "is resulting in less discipline, less unit cohesion, and more distractions from the training program," the Kassebaum Baker report concluded.

Conservatives used the report last year to win House passage of legislation directing the services to change policy. A bipartisan group of senators blocked the legislation, however, urging members to delay any reversal of policy until the congressionally-appointed panel filed its report.

That deadline came yesterday when the panel submitted an interim report to the House and Senate.

Maginnis said the commission ignored at its peril the Kassebaum Baker commission's unanimous recommendation that gender-integrated training is not in the best interest of members of the armed forces.

"We have politicians making decisions about national defense and about military personnel issues they have no experience at all. They're listening to radicals that only want to use the military for their own purposes," Maginnis said.

With the rate of enlistment at the lowest it has ever been, and the fact that the armed services are losing a third of their first-termers and an unacceptably high percentage of careerists, the country finds itself in "a real security crisis" that can only be solved by reintroducing conscription, Maginnis said.

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